Tag Archives: welfare

Life is hard. It’s harder still when an entire class of people with their hands out stands between you and success.

Unfortunately, that’s increasingly the problem, all around the world. A recent New York Times piece tells the story of a Greek woman’s efforts to survive that country’s financial collapse. After losing her job, she tried to start a pastry business, only to find the regulatory environment impossible. Among other things, they wanted her to pay the business’s first two years of taxes up front, before it had taken in a cent. When the business failed, her lesson was this: “I, like thousands of others trying to start businesses, learned that I would be at the mercy of public employees who interpreted the laws so they could profit themselves.” Continue reading →

President Barack Obama has some bad news for poor and working class Americans: He’s going to spend the final three years of his presidency attacking the income gap.

“The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe,” the president said in a recent speech.

No coincidence the pledge to stamp out inequality comes at the same time Obama’s popularity and performance ratings are plunging due to the Obamacare fiasco. He always pivots to populism when he gets in trouble.

But this is no grand shift. Obama has been playing Robin Hood since Day One. All his major initiatives have been built on soaking the rich. Continue reading →

Contrary to stereotypes, there is no evidence that people on welfare are lazy. Indeed, surveys of welfare recipients consistently show their desire for a job. But there is also evidence that many are reluctant to accept available employment opportunities. Despite work requirements included in the 1996 welfare reform, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says less than 42% of adult welfare recipients participate in work activities nationwide. Why the contradiction?

Perhaps it’s because, while poor people are not lazy, they are not stupid either. If you pay people more not to work than they can earn at a job, many won’t work.

A new study by the Cato Institute found that in many states, it does indeed pay better to be on welfare than it does to work. Continue reading →

“‘This is painful for a liberal to admit,’ admits Nicholas D. Kristof, a Times columnist… ‘but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.’ Do tell.”

by Bill Murchison

Reason No. 1 not to tremble at the prospect of liberal ascendancy, world without end: Liberalism doesn’t work. At any rate, not the way liberals commonly suppose it’s going to work when they devise enormous taxpayer-funded, government-run programs, minimally connected, if at all, to the realities of human existence.

An article in the Dec. 9 New York Times, of all places, gleams in the darkness of the present political moment as the Obama administration works to rub away resistance to its vision of an all-encompassing federal government. “This is painful for a liberal to admit,” admits Nicholas D. Kristof, a Times columnist who, oddly, doesn’t see his job as requiring regular trashing of conservatives, “but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.” Do tell. Kristof’s careful examination of anti-poverty programs in Appalachia presents a viewpoint far more nuanced than, say, a Barack Obama speech urging the overhaul of capitalism. He finds that giving people too much free money for too long can create disincentives to live non-dependent lives. He talks about parents who pull illiterate kids out of literacy programs to avoid forfeiting a $698 monthly Supplement Security Income check meant to “help” the intellectually disabled. Continue reading →

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Frontiers of Freedom, founded in 1995 by U.S. Senator Malcolm Wallop, is an educational foundation whose mission is to promote the principles of individual freedom, peace through strength, limited government, ...